King article on scheduling: interesting note on potential Chiefs schedule...

[DaWolf]

KC could have opened with 5 of 7 on road in one scenario. That would have been brutal...

http://mmqb.si.com/2014/04/24/making...-nfl-schedule/

“We threw away probably 175 schedules that we’d have played without batting an eye five years ago,” Katz said.

Said North: “Any one of these 4,400 seeds might be the one that leads you to the finished schedule. Any one might be a dead end. You’ve got to play all of them out. But on April 16, this finished schedule popped out, and we couldn’t find one after that to beat it.”

There almost was one. Before I tell you about the schedule that won the beauty contest, let me tell you about the schedule that finished in second place. If that one had won, the Seattle Seahawks would have been steamed.

The runner-up schedule had two major Seattle glitches that NFL hates to hand teams: a three-game road trip, and a road game after a Monday night road game. And they would have happened in the same three-game stretch. In mid-season, Seattle would have played at St. Louis on a Sunday, at Washington on a Monday night, and at Kansas City on a Sunday.

Anyplace east of Spokane is far from Seattle, obviously. But this schedule would have been a killer. First a 1,787-mile flight to St. Louis, and back after the game. Then a 2,311-mile flight to Baltimore-Washington Airport, and back after the game. Then a 1,407-mile flight to Kansas City, and back after the game. That’s 11,010 air miles in 15 days … unless, of course, the Seahawks spent a week in the Midwest or East to minimize one of the back-and-forths. Commissioner Roger Goodell is the final approver-in-chief of the schedule, and I wondered whether he’d have approved one that had the Super Bowl champion with such a brutal 15-day stretch.

“Would you have played that schedule?” I asked Katz.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “We didn’t want to. We were hopeful that we’d find a better one. I think we would have, and we did. If we had to play it, I think we would have had an interesting discussion with Roger about it. We had many interesting discussions in this room about it—whether it was a fatal flaw or not. I didn’t deem it fatal, but we were hoping we could find a way out of it.”

North chimed in then. “So it turns into a robbing Peter to pay Paul scenario,” he said. “If you want to fix this Seattle problem, who do you want to break in exchange? This was a schedule that we gave serious consideration to—look at this start for Kansas City.”

North put a schedule on the monitor in the room with a dreadful opening for Kansas City: five road games in the first seven weeks. “Would we have played a schedule, if everything else was good, with five of Kansas City’s first seven on the road, including a three-game road trip—left coast, right coast, left coast?” North said.

“The answer was no,” Katz said.

“That schedule fixed Seattle, but it broke Kansas City worse than what we were doing with Seattle,” North said.

“You fix one team,” said Katz, “and 12 more problems come up.”